For a brief five-year period in Long Beach State basketball history, the 49ers ran the Triangle Offense.

At the time, Phil Jackson was a young assistant coach with the New Jersey Nets and owner of a bad disco wardrobe and Jerry Tarkanian was the most popular man in Las Vegas this side of Wayne Newton.

Michael Jordan was having trouble making his varsity basketball team in North Carolina, Shaquille O’Neal was the biggest 6-year-old in Texas, and Kobe Bryant was throwing his pacifier at a mobile hanging over his crib.

It is perhaps the most overlooked period of significant Long Beach State basketball, and considering the short list of notable 49er moments is, well, short, there’s a touch of irony that the five-year period when Tex Winter was the 49ers coach hasn’t been more celebrated.

Better late than never.

Winter, owner of nine NBA championship rings and 61 years of basketball coaching experience, will be honored before tomorrow’s 49ers game against Fullerton at the Walter Pyramid.

As sheepish as he may feel over the fuss for someone whose career at Long Beach was “nothing earthshaking,” he’s pleased that he’ll be reacquainted with a lot of his former players and that they’ll get a chance to share the moment.

Winter was the coach from 1978-79 through 1982-83, winning 78 games in five seasons, including the first eight games of his career and 22 in 1979-80. He coached a bevy of notable players who can still be found in the 49er record books.

The list included Rickey Williams, Michael Wiley, Craig Hodges, Francoise Wise, Craig Dykema, Dino Gregory and Joedy Gardner, all NBA draft picks and four of them NBA veterans, including Hodges, who had a 10-year career. The 1980 team set a record for field goal percentage that still stands, and Wise still holds the record for career rebounding average.

Not even Tark won his first eight games, and no 49er coach played a more difficult schedule. Winter opened with wins over Texas, Cincinnati, Oklahoma State, Wichita State, Kansas State and Loyola-Chicago among the first eight.

“What I remember most is that we had some great players,” Winter said from his office with the Lakers, where he still assists Jackson and helps Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol learn the finer nuances of the triangle.

“Craig was a freshman who was already a great shooter. Michael was a great player, and Wise compared well with the best rebounders of Tark’s era.”

Winter’s brief stay at Long Beach was just one stop in a basketball career that is in its seventh decade and has spanned the likes of Hank Iba and Jackson.

Winter played at Huntington Park High and Compton College before World War II and landed at USC after the war, where his teammates were Bill Sharman and Alex Hannum and he also competed for the Trojan track team, as a pole vaulter using a bamboo pole.

“I think I sliced those poles up and used them as decorations around the house,” Winter said.

He began his coaching career as an assistant at Kansas State for former USC coach Jack Gardner, the 1951 Wildcat team reaching the NCAA title game, where they were beaten by Kentucky and Adolph Rupp.

He began his head coaching career at Marquette in 1952, the youngest coach in the sport, then succeeded Gardner at K-State in 1954. In his 15 years as head coach, his teams won eight Big Eight titles and reached the Final Four twice, losing to Seattle and Elgin Baylor in the semifinals in 1958 and UCLA in the semifinals in 1964, the first title team for John Wooden.

He spent three years at Washington, a season-plus in the NBA as head coach of the San Diego-to-Houston Rockets, five years at Northwestern – “I started at Northwestern the third-winningest coach ever and left somewhere around 14th,” he said with a chuckle – and then returned home to the West Coast at Long Beach.

“I wanted to get back home, and I thought there was a better opportunity to win at Long Beach,” he said. “The conference (then the Pacific Coast Athletic Association) was very good. Fresno State had some great teams and we were competitive.

“I was a board member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches and had a lot of contacts with great coaches, and I enticed them to come to Long Beach and play. I thought the best way we could turn the program around was to have an attractive schedule and play our games at the Long Beach Arena.”

Tex’s teams hosted Texas, Cincy, K-State, Wichita State, Oklahoma State, Marquette, Michigan State, USC and Texas Tech, and played many of those teams as well as Duke, N.C. State, Illinois, Auburn, Baylor, Vanderbilt, Minnesota and Mississippi in the road. Not exactly Weber State and Cal State Bakersfield.

“We drew well, but not as well as we thought with the teams we had coming in,” he said.

His second team lost the PCAA Tournament title game in an upset to San Jose State, but then won an NIT game. His other teams advanced to the conference semis every season.

“If there had been a three-point line in the game back when we had Craig, we would have won a lot more games than we did,” he said. “We used the triangle, which was better known then as the triple post offense.”

At the end of the 1983 season, Winter thought it was time to retire. So much for that; Dale Brown asked him to be an assistant at LSU. A year later, he was hired by the Bulls to be an assistant and install the triangle, before Jackson arrived as head coach.

The rest is NBA history. His 49er career may not match up as well, but in the long run of the school’s history, he deserves a place alongside Tarkanian and anyone else to wear basketball shorts.

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